Editor's note: The Polk Museum of Art provided source material to Resource Library Magazine for the following article. If you have questions or comments regarding the source material, please contact the Polk Museum of Art directly through either this phone number or web address:
The Narrative Paintings of Hung Liu
The Polk Museum
of Art has organized an exhibition of Hung Liu's large-scale paintings in
cooperation with Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami. After emigrating from
China in 1984, Liu attended the University of California, San Diego, where
she received her Master of Fine Arts degree. She is currently an Associate
Professor of Art at Mills College in Oakland, California, and her work is
in collections across the country including the National Museum of American
Art, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum
of Art, the San 
Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art & Design. The
Narrative Paintings of Hung Liu is on display through October 27, 2002.
(left: Peacock Dowager, 1996, oil on canvas, 84 x 60 inches, Courtesy
of Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, Florida. This painting represents the
Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi.)
Her paintings combine western aesthetics with Chinese subject
matter, a cross-cultural blend that communicates Liu's unique sense of beauty
and emotion to the viewer through her extraordinarily skillful handling
of paint. Hung Liu is known for her stunning reproductions of historical
photographs of Chinese life (many taken by Western visitors), which address
the "cultural collisions" she faced while coming of age during
the decade of the Cultural Revolution in China. Her paintings often seem
both nostalgic and critical, are sometimes created on shaped canvases, and
always combine her skill as a photo-realistic painter with expressionistic
brushwork and drips of paint. Liu recreates these scenes in such a way that
specific issues of identity are explored: identity as an individual, as
a member of a cultural group, and as a foreign stereotype.
Artist's Statement:
My work of the past several years has a lot to do with
late 19th and early 20th century photographs. In general, the photographs
are of two kinds: The first kind were taken by foreign tourists in China,
and the second by Chinese of themselves -- specifically of young prostitutes
who were for sale. Together, these photographic bodies testify to a kind
of split perception of a nation, 
both
from without and within. They represent the way Chinese were seen from the
West, and the way such a perception was internalized by the Chinese themselves.
The motifs they share, which go hand-in-hand, are exoticism and patriarchal
domination. (left: Praying for Rain, 2000, oil on canvas,
80 x 80 inches, Collection of Dr. Jeffrey Gelblum, North Miami Beach, Florida.
Grandmother and granddaughter with a figurine pray for rain during the drought
season. In each corner is a mythological animal.)
Between 1860 and 1912, foreign tourists photographed the Chinese in China. Their subjects included women with bound feet, dead Chinese soldiers (who were killed in fighting with European troops), and Allied armies entering the Forbidden City. Because they were published in the West, they have never been seen in China. As a body, these photographs are evidence of cultural invasion, Western voyeurism, and early forms of the media representation of exotic "others." Not merely a record of the past, these photographs are also a clear aesthetic statement and a subjective cultural choice.
The second body of photographs, which I researched recently in a Beijing film archive (where they were stored in order to save them from the book burnings of the Cultural Revolution), are taken of young Chinese prostitutes who are being displayed in a photo-studio setting like products in a mail-order catalogue. Unlike the pictures taken by tourists and journalists, these turn-of-the-century images were taken by Chinese of Chinese, but with cameras imported from the West and in photo-studios that were designed to associate the women with works of European art, culture, and technology. If Europeans trained their cameras on the exotic East, the Chinese turned those same cameras back on themselves. The more I study the photographs, the more evidence of Euro-centric aesthetic influence in Chinese modern culture I discover. As an artist, I try to represent that evidence in my work.
With these images, I am exploring the questions of personal and national identity as they drift across the concepts and experiences of "homeland" and "new home." A photograph is always taken under certain conditions: it is site-specific and time-bound. It is involved in a sophisticated kind of storage called memory. Over time, the lack of documented background information about a photograph, its changes in terms of value and interest, and even its natural chemical decay, add to it a blurred and mysterious veil. A unique document can become a generic sign. All generic signs together create a collective bias, a cultural stereotype for both insiders and outsiders. I am especially interested in the larger ideas of identity that might be suggested in photographs whose subjects are anonymous, lost, without identity, and in transition between two times and two places. For me, these two photograph bodies reinforce that sense of transition. I also hope they will contribute to the question for identity for other Asian-American artists as well.
Biographical Information from the Exhibition:
The Polk Museum of Art has organized an exhibition of Hung Liu's large-scale paintings in cooperation with Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami. After emigrating from China in 1984, Ms. Liu attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Mills College in Oakland, California, and her work is in major museum collections across the country including the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art & Design. In 1989 and 1991, Ms. Liu received fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hung Liu's paintings combine western aesthetics with Chinese subject matter, a cross-cultural blend that communicates Liu's unique sense of beauty and emotion to the viewer through her extraordinarily skillful handling of paint. She is known for her stunning reproductions of historical photographs of Chinese life (many taken by Western visitors), which address the "cultural collisions" she faced while coming of age during the decade of the Cultural Revolution in China. Her paintings often seem both nostalgic and critical, are sometimes created on shaped canvases, and always combine her skill as a photo-realistic painter with expressionistic brushwork and drips of paint. Ms. Liu recreates these scenes in such a way that specific issues of identity are explored: identity as an individual, as a member of a cultural group, and as a foreign stereotype.
Though painting from photographs is not an uncommon practice among artists, Ms. Liu uses this technique to explore very specific and special topics. Her experiences with the negative side of recent Chinese history has been real and direct. Her father was imprisoned around the time of her birth. At age 20, she and other students were shipped out to the countryside to do hard labor. After painting in secret during her four years in the rice fields, she was sent to Beijing where she began to study Russian Social Realism (propaganda) at one of China's top art schools.
She thinks of her paintings as simultaneous destructions of and creations from the photographs. After studying the photographs to "look under" them, Ms. Liu uses paint to dissolve them, allowing the present to address problematic issues in recent Chinese history while also looking for bonds, similarities, and, ultimately, resolution. She often takes a step further by surrounding the photography-based images with traditional Chinese motifs such as Buddhas, lotus blossoms, and others that seem to have come directly from ancient Chinese scrolls. In this way, Ms. Liu has tied her art to the greater tradition of Chinese art, while creating works that could only have been made within the contemporary world of American art.
The Museum would like to express its appreciation to Bernice Steinbaum and her staff at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami for bringing this exhibition together for the Polk County community.
Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional source by visiting the sub-index page for the Polk Museum of Art in Resource Library Magazine.
Search for more articles and essays on American art in Resource Library. See America's Distinguished Artists for biographical information on historic artists.
This page was originally published in 2002 in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information.
Copyright 2012 Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit corporation. All rights reserved.